This is a great panel discussion and well worth watching for sure. I found everyone on the panel interesting. I had a set-up back in 1980 before midi was invented and was trying then to get multiple instruments to play from some sort of sequencer. I was wanting to combine different machines from different makers as they did have a different sound from each other. Getting different brands working together was tricky for sure. Multi track tape was it for a while there.
I had the
Oberheim System for a while and all the stuff Tom talked about was true. Earth loops issues and also just getting it all to work properly! . Especially when connecting different CV and gate signals around the place. Korg had their own standard here. I could get the DSX sequencer from the system talking to other machines though so it was sort of the way there. Midi changed all that though.
When asked what some of the problems of midi were people did go quiet a bit there but what should have been said was the timing issues of talking to multiple instruments down one midi port. If you wanted 16 instruments to all hit the same beat the potential for the worst case machine being about 16 ms late is possible. But this is easily overcome by using multiple midi ports and putting one or two machines on one port only. Midi is pretty fast and the internal latency for a synth to make a sound comes into play as well. The fact that the three packets of data can be sent in about 1 ms is very good latency. I also think there are plenty of CC codes to take care of a lot of things too now and into the future. I love the way modern computers and sequencers can advance or delay midi track timing to allow for all of this. Also I have limited my hardware set-up to only 8 powerful machines and they can have their own midi port each so timing can be very tight when it needs to be.
I did not agree about modern virtual machines not sounding as good as their original designs. That is incorrect. They do and they can sound very much like the original machines but go way further. Control surfaces can access lots of functions now just as well as they did earlier with knobs everywhere.
Great extra perspectives too from Jordan, George and Alan. Parsons is someone who would have used midi right from the start and still is. I am like that myself. It still forms the basis of my whole external hardware setup and does so still so easily right now. It connects three computers together so painlessly too and it all works so well.
Velocity is something that midi added. Before that most analog synths did not have it and we had to great lengths to program it in. Touch sensitivity just was not in the playing domain for many years and all of sudden it was and just so good to have it. SPP pointer made it possible to reliably lock up to an 8 track for example and track live players over midi sequencers. I made great use of it for years. And later timecode came in and it was more flexible. Tempos could be altered afterwards.
It is wonderful that midi is still around and as Dave put it modern machines or computers can still connect to either a new hardware analog release or a much older technologies without issues using it.